Comment ... Ah, the controversial death penalty.. Cruel and unusual punishment.. Lawyers have been tossing this back and forth for years... Some leaders in Connecticut want to bring it back now.. The Governor here not to long ago stopped it, however in a country run by Lawyers for Lawyers what do you expect... New Laws are being made that circumvent existing laws to fit the crimes of the politicians, the rich and famous or anybody that fits certain profiles. Its going to be and still is a long battle.. I have a feeling that its all about the money and not about what is right and wrong...

On this day in 1933 Giuseppe Zangara shoots Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, in Miami, Florida. Zangara’s shots missed President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, who was with Cermak at the time. Cermak was seriously wounded and died on March 6. Immediately after Mayor Cermak died from the gunshot wounds, Zangara was indicted and arraigned for murder. He pled guilty and died in the electric chair on March 20, only two weeks after Cermak died. Today such a swift outcome would be practically unheard of, particularly where the death penalty is concerned. Changes began in the 1950s. In the most notable case, Caryl Chessman spent almost 12 years on California’s death row before going to the gas chamber in 1960 for kidnapping. His appeals kept him alive while he wrote three published books and caught the attention of Hollywood and the international community, who lobbied publicly on his behalf. The Chessman battle did more than any other case to politicize the death penalty; some credit it with bringing Ronald Reagan (who fiercely opposed commuting Chessman’s sentence) to office as California’s governor. Chessman was one of the last Americans to be executed for committing a crime other than murder. Such cases have become commonplace in modern times. Jerry Joe Bird met his demise through a lethal injection in Texas in 1991, after 17 years on death row. In 1999, two inmates who had been on death row for 20 years appealed to the Supreme Court that the long delay itself was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court declined to hear their appeal, ruling that the prisoners had caused the delay themselves.

Tags:

Comments

The death penalty to me is wrong. Barbaric. I'm amazed it went on here until the 1960s.

Listened to an interesting radio program the other week. A small sample group of people were given a hypothetical situation and were asked what they thought a suitable punishment would be. It turned out that they mostly thought the person should be punished more than they actually were. Then they were given all the actual details and all disagreed with the judge, thinking that the judgement was too harsh! The point of the program was, that if everybody were to 'sit in' on the legal proceedings of every trial, they would be much more understanding about how the 'crime' came about and there would be much less calls for all the harsh sentences the judges are making, according to government decree. I think this a good idea. All we get is sensationalised headlines and never all the details and only sometimes the outcome.